Posts Tagged ‘alienation’

Admittedly, only the last of these three works — the unparalleled Can Dialectics Break Bricks? — is truly an example of détournement in the classic sense, but all three of them do engage in the practice of using borrowed material for purposes wildly different than those they were originally intended for. Détournement is a technique […]

Múm’s video for Rhubarbidoo (off Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy, their latest album) is one of the most re-enchanting videos that I’ve seen for a long time. If, as Max Weber has argued, Enlightenment rationalization, especially as it manifests itself in the bureaucratized capitalism of Western society, results in a disenchanted world where we […]

BLU, the Bologna-based street artist and wall-art animator, has recently teamed up with David Ellis, a Brooklyn-based “motion painter,” to produce the animated work COMBO, an amazing piece of urban re-inhabitation that imaginatively brings dead urban space back to life through the use of paint and stop motion. In the opening sequence of COMBO, a […]

Valéry, who had a fine eye for the cluster of symptoms called “civilization,” has characterized one of the pertinent facts. “The inhabitant of the great urban centers,” he writes, “reverts to a state of savagery — that is, of isolation. The feeling of being dependent on others, which used to be kept alive by need, […]